An important scientific contribution by John Gilman

originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
You can make a low alcohol wine in a hot latitude by climbing a mountain, picking early, or using osmosis to remove some of the excess. Seems to me each pays a different price, all likely to rise if things continue to get hotter.
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Choice of cultivar matters a lot.

Bandol makes wonderful mourvedre at low elevation without r/o.
 
originally posted by Brian C:
I don't know. There seems to be some reasonably low to middling alcohol wines coming out of hot places like S France, Southern Italy, Australia, Cali etc. All personal attacks aside it seems like a valid question.
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I just brought in some new wines from Ischia at 13%, which I don't often see in N. Italy. I think Joe's right about cultivars.
 
Clonal selection and pruning/training, too. Grenache on wires seems to get more sugar than goblet-styled vines in the Southern Rhône.
 
originally posted by Yixin:
Clonal selection and pruning/training, too. Grenache on wires seems to get more sugar than goblet-styled vines in the Southern Rhône.
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Yeah, but it's Grenache.
Eh.
Best, Jim
 
Jim, Jim, Jim... emoticon! I do have a soft sport for grenache, done well anyway.

Bandol is no lowish alcohol wine, which of course you know Joe. I think warm climate wines are fine to reflect some warmth. Just seems some varieties tolerate it better than others. Grenache, mourvedre among them, zinfandel in the new world too.

But really, I think alcohol isn't the issue. It's winemaking style, including pick times. Old school hotter climate wines from southern France to central Spain can sport some high alcohols (14%+). And so what? With some roasted meats and vege, and otherwise assertively flavored food, these wines fit. But if you push it further, or simply take measures to doll up the wine with oak, and especially if you show it very little oxygen in the elevage or oddly enough MicOx things to polish the wine beyond recognition, you end up with wines disorderlies hate. Purple, fruity, oaky wines of little distinction that seem to trade the vagaries of old world outcomes for something modern, slick, predictable and, ultimately, forgettable.

To me, what's regrettable in wine isn't alcohol, it's thickness. Extraction and flavorings instead of intensity. The cellar, not the vines. And if the vines in a hot climate produce higher sugars than we might brag about in Oregon vintages like 2011 (20.3 brix! fuck yeah!), so be it.
 
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
I'm sorry if this is too naive but I'd like to ask: what is the right answer to Gilman's observations:
-- Spain has had hot weather throughout the recent centuries, yet the wines are only big and alcoholic recently.
-- Dawes is able to find Spanish wines at reasonable alcohol, but shouldn't the weather make that impossible?
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I cannot supply the right answer, but I can quote from Patience Gray's "Honey From a Weed" (1986):

"Like the Catalan wine of the Priorat, the Apulian wine is of such strength that it is acquired to reinforce weaker wines, for the manufacture of aperitifs, or drunk on the spot. One comes at least to realise that the soil produces by natural alchemy the kind of wine that exactly corresponds to and offsets the rigours of its particular climate. Naxos in the Cyclades, the Priorat in Catalonia, the Apulian Salento produce wines of similar intensity (17 degrees) which drink in situ are life-giving, but transported to a milder climate simply knock you out."
 
For me, the issue with alcohol isn't so much its affect on flavor, which can be balanced, as you point out, but how fast the wine blitzes you. But I imagine how fast you get blitzed is related to what you've grown up drinking, so adult predisposition to alcohol tolerance could be geographically determined.

Of course, now there's Skinny Girl Wine, at the other extreme.

I wonder if MicOx could be a foil for PremOx in white Burgundy?
 
originally posted by Steven Spielmann:
Oswaldo - what's the cost with mountain wines, do you think?
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My supposition is that the ratio of heat to light will be significantly different in places with the same average temperature but different altitudes. The few discussions I've seen of this seem to focus on temperature, rather than light.

Even within temperature parameters, two places with equal averages but different altitudes will have different amplitudes.
 
Earth's atmosphere is transparent to photosynthetically active solar radiation, which should therefore strike the plants' leaves at a constant rate, regardless of how high the vineyard is (assuming comparable exposure and latitude); that is, altitude alone shouldn't effect how much sunlight the plants receive, or their rate of photosynthesis.

But temperatures will usually cool as you go higher in the troposphere: lower temperatures would slow enzyme activity, and therefore the rate of sugar formation.

What affect does cooling have on the development of other flavoring components, or are they just by-products of photosynthesis?
 
originally posted by Ian Fitzsimmons:
Earth's atmosphere is transparent to photosynthetically active solar radiation, which should therefore strike the plants' leaves at a constant rate, regardless of how high the vineyard is (assuming comparable exposure and latitude); that is, altitude alone shouldn't affect how much sunlight the plants receive, or their rate of photosynthesis.

But temperatures will usually cool as you go higher in the troposphere: lower temperatures would slow enzyme activity, and therefore the rate of sugar formation.

What affect does cooling have on the development of other flavoring components, or are they just by-products of photosynthesis?
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Ian,
What you say is true for light in the visible range, but not for UV. UV exposure increases with elevation, and this may have some effect on the accumulation of phytoalexins (such as polyphenols) in the skins of the grapes.

Mark Lipton
 
originally posted by Ian Fitzsimmons:
(assuming comparable exposure and latitude)
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But my whole point is about noncomparable latitudes; about thinking you can compensate for being in the "wrong" latitude by climbing a mountain.
 
Interesting. Of course there almost surely must be differences.

I tend to like mountain wines (albeit most of them on the borders of the Alps); and I also think that higher altitude wines in 'normal' winegrowing regions tend to do better in hot years than their lower-planted cousins. This is based on unscientific drinking of my own, of course.

So I would have thought that all things being equal if you are in hot climate you'd be better off trying higher altitude. But all things are never equal, and better off still may not add up to good wine, so.
 
originally posted by MLipton:
originally posted by Ian Fitzsimmons:
Earth's atmosphere is transparent to photosynthetically active solar radiation, which should therefore strike the plants' leaves at a constant rate, regardless of how high the vineyard is (assuming comparable exposure and latitude); that is, altitude alone shouldn't affect how much sunlight the plants receive, or their rate of photosynthesis.

But temperatures will usually cool as you go higher in the troposphere: lower temperatures would slow enzyme activity, and therefore the rate of sugar formation.

What affect does cooling have on the development of other flavoring components, or are they just by-products of photosynthesis?
Click to expand...

Ian,
What you say is true for light in the visible range, but not for UV. UV exposure increases with elevation, and this may have some effect on the accumulation of phytoalexins (such as polyphenols) in the skins of the grapes.

Mark Lipton
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It's true for PAR, which extends a bit beyond the visible range on the infrared end.

Thanks for the UV note; I didn't think there was significant dioxygen filtering below the stratospheric ozone, and haven't a clue about UV's affect on grape physiology. Is this process analogous to, say, vitamin D formation in people?

In any event, if polyphenol development rate speeds up, while sugar creation slows, then the role altitude can play on the grapes' whole flavor gestalt is substantial, which is relevant to Oswaldo's point.

Flying off on a tangent, slope gradient should also affect the rate of sugar creation, fwiw, because of air drainage. Even a modest slope allows cool night air to drain away rapidly in the morning, so the day's photosynthesis can come up to speed more quickly than it would on flat ground.
 
I take Oswaldo's point to be that, if you are at a latitude that gives long, hot days, you can try to compensate for the heat by using the coolness of higher altitudes but that that compensation will not really work because of differences of exposure to light. He is not saying that higher altitude wines may not be better than lower altitude wines at the same latitude. And, so, of course, if you're stuck planting vineyards in a hot climate, higher altitude wines may be better there than wines at the same latitude by a lower altitude, but they won't be the same as wines from a cooler climate latitude. I don't know if this is true, but to respond to him, you need to respond to the argument he's posing.
 
originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
originally posted by Ian Fitzsimmons:
(assuming comparable exposure and latitude)
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But my whole point is about noncomparable latitudes; about thinking you can compensate for being in the "wrong" latitude by climbing a mountain.
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Right; I was trying to sort out what parameter the compensation would be attributable to. My point is that sunlight available for photosynthesis should not vary because of a change in altitude alone. But temperature would vary with altitude, because air usually is cooler the higher you go (within the troposphere), which is a basis for the compensation you're thinking of.

Mark has pointed out that changes in altitude may affect grape development in ways unrelated to photosynthesis, so that the latitude-altitude tradeoff is not exact, in any event.

Cheers.
 
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